From Thanksgiving to New Years Day and the following weekend, the college football schedule is filled with bowl games.  After the New Year begins, college sports fans can turn their attention to the height of the college basketball season that culminates in the annual March Madness NCAA Division I tournament.  College athletics is big business although perhaps only ten to twenty Division I programs make money each year.

While many books have been written about sports including college sports, there are a few that I found interesting for their background about the origins of the modern college sports “game” and its current state of commercialization.   John Thelin’s  A History of American Higher Education is a fairly comprehensive book about the origins and development of America’s colleges and universities.  In a chapter entitled “Alma Mater,” Thelin outlines major developments during the 1890’s to 1920, a time period that he calls the “age of university building” and the “golden age of the college.”  During this period, going to college became “fashionable and prestigious” and the national media covered the daily life of a college student in the same manner that the lives of the rich and famous are covered today.  During that period, university colors and mascots were conceived and adopted and the role of alumni associations and fundraising became very important.

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Graphic from Measuring Up 2006, a publication of The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, showing the increasing costs of various consumer goods and services in relation to the Consumer Price Index.

As a recipient of financial aid in the 1970’s when I attended Duke and Tulane, I can relate to the continual and ongoing debate about the affordability of college.  I was fortunate to have parents who believed in the benefits of higher education and who told me to “go to the best school that you can get into and we’ll figure out how to pay whatever the financial aid office says that we have to pay.”  Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Fast forward a few decades and it’s difficult to pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about the issues surrounding the affordability of higher education.  The subject is complex, solutions are complex, and many people have opinions on the issue.  Robert Bliwise writes an article in the July-August issue of Duke Magazine that articulates the view from his vantage point as a professor of public policy.  There are a few highlights that I’ll mention and will certainly resurface in a few ongoing pieces about the financial aid debate.

Bliwise begins with a description of a book published twenty years ago by Charles Clotfelter (Duke ’69) called Buying the Best.  Clotfelter, a public policy professor at Duke, examined the way selective colleges and universities competed for the best students and awarded aid.  Students weren’t price sensitive about an elite education in those days and financial aid was growing faster than any other area of campus spending.  In the article, Clotfelter discusses the issues between need-based aid and merit aid.  Clotfelter defends need-based aid as “a guarantor of the brand,” and states that the value of the institution would be diminished if only the affluent could attend.  I agree, personally and professionally.  Bliwise quotes Duke’s undergraduate admissions director, Christoph Guttentag, as stating that there’s now a competition between the “haves and the have-mores” in demonstrating the social contract balancing the affluent and the needy.  Bliwise provides a list of thirty-six “elite” schools that have created more generous financial-aid packages for families with incomes ranging from $40,000-$100,000 per year.

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